First of all my apologies for the delay in completing this wrap-up. I’m still posting it on the principle of better late than never.

On March 18 the #4Change Twitter Chat took on the topic of ‘How Social Media Can Enhance Events.’ This topic seemed particularly apropos with the chat taking place immediately after the annual SXSW takeover of Twitter, and soon before the Non-profit Technology Conference and Skoll World Forum, two other conferences with an oversized online presence. Social media at events has also been on my mind recently with Ashoka hosting Tech4Society in Hyderabad India and the Ashoka Future Forum in Washington DC, both more social media-enabled than any previous Ashoka-organized events.

It is almost hard to imagine these days a significant event not having a social media component, whether this is simply individuals in the room tweeting or a resourced effort by the host. So the question is not, as it once was, “will social media be created?” but rather “will this social media enhance the event?”

As Christina Jordan posed in the pre-chat blog post, What’s the potential benefit of using social media to cover events? For whom?

Numerous benefits of a conscious strategy to utilize social media at events were suggested by chat participants including taking the stories and examples being shared to a wider (and more diverse) audience, allowing organizers and the cloud see what is resonating with attendees and creating a back-channel for attendees to interact and debate, as well as allowing those not in attendance to feed their points of view into this discussion. This can often allow people to say what isn’t being said out-loud in the room, as well as giving those unable to attend physically some sense of participating in and benefiting from the event. Social media can also assist with documentation, capturing key thoughts and currents during the day and allowing them to be looked back over afterwards. For the vast majority of events there will be no mainstream media coverage: only social media will carry and record the outcomes of these gatherings beyond the immediate attendees.

Concerns were also expressed however at the possible distraction and disruption at events, with TED pointed out as an example of an event that doesn’t allow tweeting during sessions.

So what are the key elements of a successful event social media strategy? 4 key elements were identified: Preparation; Resourcing; Aggregation and; Integration.

1. Preparation. Preparation, as with most things, is critical to get the maximum impact from your social media efforts. Tags should be identified and distributed to all participants beforehand, inviting them to take part in creating content on the day. Create groups for photos and videos to be shared and be careful to choose a twitter hashtag not already in use. If you’re doing live streaming test thoroughly. Prepare widgets for deployment.

2. Resourcing. It requires a dedicated person to effectively create social media at an event, whether they are live tweeting, live blogging or uploading video and photos. Multiple dedicated people will be required to do all of these things. Having at least one person exclusively focused on the online conversation allows multiple threads to be pulled together and background information identified. For example at the recent TEDxAshokaU event I was tweeting links to the profiles of the Ashoka Fellows as they spoke, providing crucial additional information to anyone intrigued by the quotes emanating from the room.

3. Aggregation. With most successful events generating a considerable volume of diverse social content aggregating this into one place where it can be easily accessed is critical. Most people felt that this was a job best done manually by a discerning staffer or volunteer (another resourcing issue). An example of this sort of aggregation is the Tech4Society coverage page, updated daily during the event with new blog posts and videos and containing a Twitter widget displaying the #tech4soc stream.

4. Integration. If you are integrating social media into the live event experience it needs to be seamless and well managed. Screens with running twitter streams can be very distracting to participants and presenters. On the other hand they can also provide a platform for sourcing questions, generating discussion or even choosing the agenda. If you are capturing video during the day can this be presented back to participants at the end of the day as a way of summarizing proceedings?

Video was touted as an increasingly important tool in all its forms: live streaming, rapidly-produced interviews and audience reactions and better-produced videos of presentations ala TED. It was also pointed out however that video poses particular bandwidth issues, making it inaccessible to view or event get online in many parts of the world. As a real-world example of this we were unable to upload videos as planned from Tech4Society in India due to bandwidth limitations.

At the end of the chat participants were asked for their takeaways, as is customary:
@Nidhi_C: takeaway: when planned, #socmedia can play role of a valuable audience participant, add spice to discussion, & connect
@liadavide: Takeaway: SM is a great tool but still has some way to go especially in areas with poor telecom infrastructure
@karitas: takeaway: if prepared/promoted right, SM can bring live/remote participants 2gether, & add fun/useful layers 2 experience.
@tashjudd: takeaway – social media has fundamentally changed who audience of an event can be, possibilities are much wider now
@christinasworld: my takeaway – preplanning of a #socialmedia strategy is really important
@amysampleward: takeaway: sm at events has 3 audiences: presenters, present audience, remote audience. create value in/out 4 all.

My takeaway? An event without a social media strategy is a wasted opportunity. Events now provide a platform much bigger than the event itself, allowing more people to participate in the conversation and experience elements of the content. While live experiences are unique and essential social media is a lever to push the impact of the event beyond those in attendance.

Additional resources:
Social Media Enabling Conferences: A Tech4Society Case Study (Netsquared)
A Few Reflections from SXSW Crowdsourcing Panel (Beth’s Blog)
3 Ways Live Events Help Online Communities (Mashable)
Social Reporters toolbox (Delicious)

During the week of  September 21 I was laid up with a bad back and while I was it was very cool to see all the videos produced by the Ashoka Team at the Clinton Global Initiative. The increasing use of video at Ashoka, and at citizen sector organizations overall, is wonderful to see. A year ago Ashoka’s approach to video was very traditional – footage would be shot and, time-permitting, edited into something usable. Now the focus is on fast, one-take, minimally edited videos that can be shared live or very rapidly with our online audience. It’s our immersion into social media that inspires this new approach – being involved in a real-time conversation with our supporters and peers creates an emphasis on timeliness and humanness. To this end people from different parts of the Ashoka family where profiled at CGI: Fellows, staff and supporters.

It was the first-time we’ve emphasized video as a reporting tool from a live event like this. We have learnt a lot from this pilot and will be using this learning to better cover future events, including our Tech 4 Society conference in Hyderabad India in February next year, one of the biggest gatherings we have hosted.

These learnings include improved coordination between the production of videos and the conversation at and about the event. For instance, if we see an Ashoka Fellow or staff member saying something interesting or profound over their twitter feed we should try and grab them as soon as possible and get them to expand on those thoughts on video. This would more powerfully embed our videos into the conversation, rather than just using the twitter conversation as just an outreach platform.

The ongoing development of Ashoka’s online communities and the clear interest and enthusiasm for stories from the Ashoka network has inspired this greater focus on developing timely content that can be shared with these communities. The understanding of the importance and benefits of this approach is becoming widespread across the organization, such that it barely requires me to suggest let alone implement these efforts. And that, to me, is the most exciting thing of all, evidence of the real culture-change taking place at Ashoka as we become more social, more participatory and more focused on storytelling.

Here are a couple of my favourite of our videos from CGI:

Ashoka Fellow Harmish Hande:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k5AKpQpFg8

And a super-cute video with my boss, head of Global Marketing Beverly Schwartz:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C69ftNBi-A

You can see all the Ashoka CGI videos here.

Tom is the Digital Marketing Strategist at Ashoka and a founder member of the 4change collective. This is cross-posted from Tom’s personal blog.

Towards the end of the last #4change chat the conversation moved into discussing how most non-profits are not there yet when it comes to social media and the barriers, from the attitudinal to capacity to connectivity, standing in the way. I’ve been thinking more about these issues and want to outline further some of the attitudional barriers that were mentioned. I think it’s these attitudinal, or cultural, barriers which are the most interesting. Resource scarcity and skills shortages are always a challenge for non-profits but, ultimately, are simply a matter of prioritization. Connectivity is obviously essential and very unevenly provided across the globe and, once these other elements are in place a coherent strategy is fundamental to your success. But even with everything else lined up unless your organization has a culture which supports social media it will much less effective at it than hoped for.

Several of these attitudinal barriers were mentioned during the #4Change chat: Fear, passivity and a desire for control.

Fear:

of the unknown, of not doing it right, of missing the mark. Non-profits spend a lot of time worrying about their public perception, and often caring deeply about a wealthier and, often, more conservative cohort (those able to donate substantively to charity and social change) than the population at large. A fear with offending this group can cramp an organization’s style online. You must obviously but mindful of public perception, and be deeply attuned to your brand and values, but social media does requires strategic fearlessness. You’ll make mistakes, you’ll misspell and misspeak occasionally, but learn from these mistakes and get better at social media through practice, it’s the only way.

Passivity:

Passivity is never a recipe for success. While it is possible to automate much of your social media, updating your Twitter feed and Facebook page via RSS when a press release or blog post is uploaded, people can tell when you’re not really present on these platforms and will be much less likely to engage with you. If you’re going to make social media a meaningful part of your outreach strategy you need to give it the time and human resources to succeed. You see this repeatedly in Facebook – seemingly every organization in the Western world has a Facebook group but most are clearly never checked, with questions and offers of help unanswered on their wall, projecting the opposite of what you’d want: disinterest. There’s nothing magic about having a Facebook group, the not-so-secret sauce is in actually using it as a space to share information and engage with people. In other words: being proactive. This is equally true for Twitter, MySpace and other social media platforms.

A desire for control:

Social Media allows your supports and staff to be more effective advocates for you, and nothing is more effective than people talking in their own words about something they care passionately about. But allowing people to talk in their own words risks your marketing becoming diluted, your finely-crafted messaging forgotten. This can’t be helped but can be mitigated by actively engaging with your supporters and providing them with the tools to better promote you. But if you aren’t comfortable with misspelt words and colloquialisms you’re going to find social media, and the real, human, non-pr language that comes with it, very difficult. If you’re running every draft tweet past senior executives for approval you’re not going to get anywhere.

You can see an example of this with copyright. Does your organization use Creative Commons licenses for your online media? If not, how can you expect people to help you share your content and your message?

As Clay Shirky said in his recent TED talk: social media is about convening your supporters, not controlling them.

Attitudinal factors are only one of the barriers between non-profits and social media success, but they’re an often-overlooked one I believe, less obvious than resourcing issues or inadequate internal processes. I’d love to hear of any others you might have encountered. Being cognizant of these barriers allows us to more effectively lead our organizations through them, creating not only successful social media outreach strategies but more transparent, responsive and adaptive organizations in the process.

Cross-posted from Tom’s personal blog.

This is cross-posted from Tom’s personal blog:

Thank you to @lethalsheethal for her excellent and vastly more timely reflection on the chat. Having just discovered it I’d like to recommend http://www.printyourtwitter.com as creating by far the most digestible (and printable, naturally) twitter transcript (ht @writerpollock).

The topic of the most recent #4change chat was “How does social media open new doors for collaboration?” It was a vibrant and thought-provoking conversation, in my opinion the best #4change chat we’ve had so far.

There is no question that social media has created enormous new collaborative possibilities. Some of these are in the sharing of data, such as the Social Entrepreneurship API being developed by Social Actions and the merging of the North American green business databases of Gen Green (@gengreen) and 3^rd Whale (@3rdwhale), which was announced at the start of the chat. This was interesting and welcome news, but business alliances of this type are not uncommon. What, we wondered, where the unique collaborative capacities of social media?

@engagejoe summed up some of these possibilities as “exposing overlap, sharing resources, connecting communities, forging partnerships.” These things are not unique to social media but they are native to it – social media makes overlap and waste more transparent, speeds up information sharing and relationship-building and can increase the impact of collaborations. Messages can be shared between communities and networks both real-time and ad-hoc. And as #4change itself demonstrates conversations can be convened that were never possible before.

But how much of this is happening? And if these possibilities are not being realized what are the barriers standing in the way?

The conversation part seems easiest. It is, by definition, what social media facilitates. Making this conversations intentional, productive and constructive is harder, but we still see examples of this all around us, on forums and wiki’s, blogs and microblogs, communities closed and open. These conversations can create new insights, understanding and relationships. And these conversations can lead to concrete action, from protests to petitions, fundraising to collaborative databases.

There was a real skepticism felt by some in the conversation about whether real work was being done online. This, of course, depends on what real work is to you, but most would agree that hearts and minds are a key part of most forms of social change and so anything that brings us into contact with each other in new ways has the ability to move us in new ways. As Michael Wesch said in his presentation at Personal Democracy Forum this year, “We know ourselves through our relationships with others. New media is creating new ways to relate.”

But to really scale-up the collaborative possibilities of social media we need to empower and lead our organizations to work together in new ways. As @ChristinasWorld said: “if we could get orgs and passionate people to start working together at a sector/issue level things will start to get exciting.” One key challenge to doing this, as @edwardharran pointed out, is that “social media is pocketed in silos.” While we might wish that this wasn’t the case it is simply a fact of human existence that we build groups at all sizes, but that our closest communities are smaller and more digestible, whether on or offline (although the scale of what’s digestible varies widely between these two states). With these distributed, frustratingly uncoordinated conversations also comes enormous space for innovation and creative thinking. However better search, aggregation and distribution is needed to reveal these conversations to each other in ways that support collaboration. We can see steps in this direction with WiserEarth groups showing related groups and Zanby which allows groups to connect while retaining their independence.

A schema began to emerge from the conversation which identified three distinct types of collaboration:

1. organization-to-organization

2. organization-to-individuals

3. individuals-to-individuals.

Again and again the majority of the examples brought up where the later two. For 2. you have organizations like the Sunlight Foundation who are harnessing the contributions of hundreds of coders to create their transparency tools and OneYoungWorld who are using social media to find 1500 leaders of tomorrow. You also have new tools which facilitate this form of collaboration in exciting new ways like The Extraordinaries. For 3. there are grassroots political fundraising campaigns and the entire open source movement.

(4. was also later suggested by @engagejoe: people-within-organizations. Any more?)

For 1. there is the previously-cited Social Actions-style data aggregation and sharing and some great examples of organizations collaborating around a social media-enabled campaign, such as the just-launched climate change campaign tcktcktck (@tcktcktc) but there was a clear feeling that much of this landscape remains to be filled out.

In discussing the barriers to better social media collaboration between non-profits people nominated time intensity vs staffing resources, fear, lack of connectivity in many parts of the world, desire to tightly control their message, geography and time zones and lack of skills as prime candidates. The need for clear strategy so as to not waste precious staff resources was also mentioned, along with the observation that many non-profits do not have the knowledge or experience to develop this strategy.

To close people were asked for their key takeaways from the conversation:

• “There is a desire to evolve toward more collaborative outputs; SM [social media] may not be enough to get there” – @ChristinasWorld
• “It’s given me ideas about the barriers NP [non-profits] face with SM” – @chilli07
• “I think #4change in itself is a great example of international collaboration” – @tashjudd
• “Main takeaway: a sense of optimism. SM is not going anywhere and collaboration is only going to continue to get bigger and better” – @edwardharran
• “SM can be chaotic but still work” – @zerostrategist
• “I now see more kinds of collaboration: people-within-org, org-to-community, community-to-community, org-to-org” – @engagejoe

And if I could be so bold as to end on my own takeaway:

• “We must learn to collaborate as individuals first, then teach our organizations how.”

————————————————————————————-

Please let us know what topics you’d like to cover in future chats!

In addition to instigating the #4change chats I have also been involved in establishing another monthly twitter-based conversation for social entrepreneurs, their supporters and partners called #SocEntChat. Having just written this post for SocialEarth I thought people visiting here would also be interested in knowing about it:

Twitter is proving to be an incredibly powerful tool for entrepreneurs, activists and researchers to share their stories, ideas and causes, building tribes of followers who can help them in their missions. #SocEntChat uses Twitter as a platform to bring these people together, convening monthly real-time forums to help identify promising initiatives and techniques, connect with possible allies and partners and share knowledge and insights.

I initiated #SocEntChat (short of Social Entrepreneur Chat) as part of my role as Digital Marketing Strategist at Ashoka, an international citizen-sector organization founded by Bill Drayton, often called “the father of social entrepreneurship,” which seeks to create an Everyone a Changemaker world. After 28 years of supporting leading social entrepreneurs in over 70 countries and building infrastructure to support changemakers we see an incredibly important part of our mission as convening social entrepreneurs and their supporters to help accelerate change.

So the question I asked myself as I launched our account @AshokaTweets earlier this year was, how could Twitter help us further this mission? After having been inspired by the success of the weekly #Journchat discussions, which focus on how technology is impacting journalism and PR, we made the decision to use our networks to host an equivalent monthly event for social entrepreneurs. Nathaniel Whittemore, social entrepreneurship blogger at Change.org agreed to be my co-host and the first #SocEntChat was held in April to try and capture the learnings from the Skoll World Forum. Since then we have covered Social Entrepreneurship on Campuses and Green Entrepreneurship. You can read the transcripts here, here, and here. You can also read the reflections from David Strelneck, coordinator of Green Initiatives at Ashoka, on the last #SocEntChat here.

We have been thrilled by the response and the quality of the conversations help so far. Despite the severe length limitations of Twitter the discussions have reached a surprising depth, whether in considering how new voices could be heard at the Skoll World Forum, how to better connect students and off-campus communities or the best role for Government in fostering green innovation.

This Wednesday from 4-6pm US EDT (GMT-4) we’ll explore the exciting possibilities of Mobile Innovation, a week after Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation co-hosted an event in Nairobi Kenya on this topic. Innovation in the use of mobile technologies for social change are leaping rapidly ahead, whether in the form of The Extraordinaries use of smart phones for volunteering, using SMS to share the daily price of goods at market so that rural farmers in Africa get a better deal or mobile phones being used for banking in the absence of more traditional  financial infrastructure.

I hope you’ll join us!

WHY

Technology is exciting. It creates new possibilities, new platforms for expression, information-sharing and collaboration. And these new possibilities give rise to the hope, sometimes realized, often not, that we can move past old problems, hurdle the barriers to a better world in a sudden triumphant leap.

Technology does, indeed, change things, and those of us who have come together to organize the #4change twitter chats and write this blog are fascinated and excited by the changes social media is catalyzing. We believe that social media has given rise to the most explosive increase in human creativity and expression the world has ever seen, and that in this explosion there is the possibility to fundamentally remake some of our most intractable institutions and traditions: organizations, corporations, universities, government. And not just government but democracy itself. Not just universities but the way that people are educated. And, perhaps, not just corporations but capitalism itself and not just organizations but how social change happens.

But we are also mindful that technologies do not, on their own, a better world make. It is only the conscious, committed and creative uses of new technologies that will realize our hopes and fulfill our dreams, that will bring people together in new ways to together create a world more democratic, sustainable and equal than the one we found. Call us cautiously, hopefully, optimistic. That’s why we are here; because we are committed to this work and we recognize it as work, something to be honed and refined and improved by practice. This is the way change happens.

Not so long ago a new communications technology was born, conceived in university labs and fueled by military funding this new technology slowly began to pick up adherents, initially the geeky few but eventually a mass market was created. The possibilities of this new technology led many to naturally imagine the democratizing potential of the medium. Here are some things they said:

The new technology was “capable not only of transmitting but receiving, not isolating [the user] but connecting” them. Users would “jump around the world and wipe out for all time the age-old barriers of race and language and distance”. Government would become “a living thing to its citizens” and this would give us “a new kind of statesman and a new kind of voter.”
The technology being discussed here is radio and the quotes are from the 20’s and 30’s (and taken from “Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet” by Graham Meilke 2002). The radio spectrum of today is unrecognizable in these claims, overrun as it is by conservative talk radio and bland chart music.

Could this happen to the internet? In a word: doubtful. The internet is too open, too diffuse and too decentralized to become the barren landscape most radio has become. But it could fall well short of our ambitions. We, however, have a vote in how this plays out. we strongly believe that all of us, connected in ways previously unimaginable, can work together to create the future we seek.

Everywhere around the world social entrepreneurs, activists and organizers are using social media in new ways, experimenting in a vast social change laboratory, seeking the formula that will move their cause forward. #4Change seeks to document and contribute to this experimentation by creating a space for people from diverse backgrounds to discuss how to use social media to bring about change, bringing together experience of what has and hasn’t worked with imagination for what should be tried next. By sharing our collective knowledge, creativity and passion we can help ensure that social media lives up to its potential.

WHAT

#4Change emerged from a series of conversations about how to better connect social media for social change practitioners around the world using Twitter. The team now involved came together organically and magically, people gravitating towards the same idea and seeking each other out to work with. It’s a true honour to be working with all of them and we also welcome the contributions from everyone else, whether in the twitter chats, or in the form of comments or guest posts.

The centerpiece of our efforts will be the monthly twitter chat, taking place from 5-7pm US Eastern Daylight time, GMT-4. We have tried to find the best compromise between the worlds unyielding time zones and believe this is it. It requires those in Sydney to get up a little early to participate from 7-9am and those in London to stay up late for a 10pm start but it seems do-able to the maximum number of people. Of course it still falls very awkwardly for many and we’re sorry about that. We’ll look into moving the time around if there’s interest. In addition to the chat we’ll be using this blog to identify take-aways and key themes from each chat, announce upcoming topics and further explore issues, ideas and examples around social media for social change. We have also set up a delicious account where we will be collecting links of interest (if you’re a delicious member please tag suggested links “4change” and follow the tag).

WHO

Finally, who are we? We are Tash Judd @tashjudd, an old colleague from Vibewire who is now the Marketing Manager for YouthNet in the UK, Joe Solomon @engagejoe in Seattle, a well-known doer-of-good-deeds, Morgan Sully @memeshift who is organizing We Operate Best Together, a travel project documenting social innovation in creative hubs, blogs at http://www.memeshift.com (and is kind enough to host our blog) and is looking for a backers willing to support his project , Amy Sample Ward @amyrsward, the Global Community Builder for NetSquared, Todd Pitt @zerostrategist, Social Media Manager at MetroStar Systems and blogger at http://www.zerostrategist.com and Edward Harran @edwardharran, a social media consultant based in Brisbane, Australia. Oh and me, @tomjd, I’m the social media guy at Ashoka:Innovators for the Public in Washington DC and formerly founder of Vibewire in Australia. Read more about us on the Authors page.

We look forward to talking a lot more about these important issues with all of you!